


Valleyxandria! The Rebecca California-Brown Story

by glowspider



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: California, Canon Compliant, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24888304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glowspider/pseuds/glowspider
Summary: A day in the life of Rebecca Costa-Brown, a California girl.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 53





	Valleyxandria! The Rebecca California-Brown Story

**Author's Note:**

> This fic would not be possible without the help of Benzimo and [Peri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CPericardium/pseuds/CPericardium), who sat on my shoulders like gargoyles voiced by George Costanza and commanded me to write this story, and then beta-ed it, and then DID ART (well, that was all Peri, but Benzo was a wonderful hypebeast). Thank you to Roon and Gaia for sitting through this nonsense.

  


Just like the day before and every day before that, Rebecca Costa-Brown rose with the sun. 

She was a strong believer in the power of the natural—chunky peanut butter, hemp rope, superpowers drawn straight from the wellspring, and anything with a large “O” printed on the label. 

“O,” of course, did not always represent the symbol for organic, nor did the organic label actually mean that much, but Rebecca was terribly smart, and her brain had made the leaps accordingly. Her shortcut enabled Rebecca to eat many things that wouldn’t conventionally fit under the all-natural label, such as Ore-Ida Golden Tater Tots and Land-O-Lakes Butter, and anything that didn’t have a big “O” could be pronounced in a typical Californian way where the substitute vowel was stretched out, thus becoming an “O.” It was a very holistic methodology.

The all-natural philosophy extended to alarm clocks. Many years ago, Rebecca had used an alternative alarm clock method: that of the mourning doves, who sat on the telephone lines above her backyard and cooed softly. She appreciated them for what they were—a sign of life on otherwise inhospitable terrain. Between the gently cooing doves and the wild packs of coyotes that roamed her neighborhood at dawn and dusk, Rebecca found something worth saving in the concrete sprawl of greater Los Angeles. 

This commensalistic relationship had continued for a long period, Rebecca with her alarm doves and her doves with the pooping where they pleased, until one cruel smoggy morning. A neighbor’s indoor-outdoor cat had found itself on the right side of the telephone pole, and Rebecca’s mourning doves had found themselves on the wrong end of the wires. Breakfast was served in a flurry of feathers. 

The event was not particularly distressing. The circle of life was more natural than any other thing in the entire world. No, what was most upsetting was that Rebecca overslept for the first time in two decades, making her tardy for a very important press conference. Funny, how Mother Nature could be so bitchin’ one day, and a total fucking bitch the next.

(Though Rebecca considered herself neutral on the whole thing, she made multiple attempts to draw the wild coyotes in, hoping they could enjoy a rich breakfast in her backyard just as the neighbor’s old cat had done. Enforcing the food chain within one’s own garden, while not technically illegal, is greatly discouraged by the State of California. It’s a soft law of sorts, unlike owning ferrets, which is very much not allowed. Perhaps if the neighbors had owned a ferret, it wouldn’t have eaten Rebecca’s mourning doves. Perhaps if the neighbors had owned a ferret, Rebecca wouldn’t have tried and failed to get the wild coyotes to eat their pet cat. Rebecca hated failure. It was like the universe was personally transmitting rancid vibes. Like a “Hey! Fuck you, Rebecca! Smell my rancid vibes!”)

(The irony of the eye-for-an-eye revenge plan had not dawned on Rebecca. It was easy to forget that she was missing an eye, since she’d performed the Siberian Suplex Finishing Move many times since the incident in 2000 and had not had any more accidents.)

So, sunrises it was. Neither June Gloom nor smog could deter the piercing rays of the California sun through Rebecca’s window. Now more than ever she was glad she didn’t splurge on transition windows to match the transition lenses on her helmet.

(Rain was a nonentity—the first time Alexandria had seen water falling from the sky was at Leviathan’s first appearance. “The fuck is this?” she asked Legend, who was a bit too busy dodging Moist Godzilla to field her questions.)

Though Rebecca rose with the sunrise as she had done many days before, today was different. Today was a very special day. Today was Rebecca’s day off. 

Every two weeks, Rebecca got one day off. To be more specific, both Alexandria and Rebecca Costa-Brown got a day off. The last two days had been co-opted by emergencies, one for PR reasons and one for global disaster reasons, and neither proved easy to sort out. 

Not that Rebecca minded. Her work-life balance was, like, nonexistent, and Rebecca preferred it that way. Having a “healthy social life” was for chumps who sucked at their jobs. Stupid idiots couldn’t even bench press a yacht. What did Rebecca even need a social life for? Coworkers were functionally the same as friends, except one could fire coworkers. If HR had a problem with such beliefs, they could say it to her face. 

Today would be a day of rest and relaxation, and by relaxation, Rebecca meant crossing things off her to-do list like the bad bitch she was. 

☀☀☀

In an ideal world, Rebecca could have started her morning by opening her window and singing to the local wildlife like an inner-city Disney Princess. The wildlife would sing back and it would all be very rad. 

Unfortunately, the fantasy simply wasn’t feasible. Rebecca had no special master powers or fauna proficiency besides the time she’d punched a mountain lion while camping in Big Bear. 

All her local wildlife friends had vanished—the coyotes had trotted off to plague a nearby golf course and the ghosts of her mourning doves had been exorcised by a sweet neighbor/hobbyist priest. The termites who had been steadily destroying her nice wood finish were nowhere to be found, following a visit from the exterminator man.

That last one was intentional. Someone would have to be a legit dipshit to accidentally get their house tented. Rebecca was very careful to have her house cloaked in austere gray and black canvas. The last thing she needed was a home that looked like a hospice for clowns. 

Rebecca could admit to herself that she missed the animals, though she did not regret doing what she had to do to drive them away. Necessary sacrifices and all. The termites had threatened to destroy everything she’d worked for—years of watching HGTV shows, of assembling premade furniture, of perusing yard sales. One pesky termite could ruin it all by chewing on the wrong bit of structural support. If this seemed at odds with Rebecca’s duties as a hero, one simply needed to contextualize the situation. Here it was from Rebecca’s (correct) perspective: Life on Earth was worth protecting, except when it inconvenienced Rebecca or tasted really good.

It really sucked to be so on the ball. It wasn't like Rebecca woke up in the morning and _asked_ for her hair to fall in perfect beachy waves, or for her abs to be so shredded, or for her skin to be so naturally sunkissed. 

☀☀☀

After powering through her morning meditation, Rebecca brewed herself some tea and checked her email. Mindlessly, she deleted an advertisement for bulletproof coffee (carcinogen) and archived an email about a Nigerian Prince (scam). The Make-a-Wish emails were starred and sorted for later viewing, and the chain email from David about penis pills went directly into spam. 

She refreshed the page. No new notifications.

Rebecca took a sip of her tea. It was the Lipton brand, which had a tubular round “O” sound. 

She exited the page, then reopened it. No new notifications.

Rebecca hopped on her stationary bike. Her pedalling was technically perfect, so efficient and powerful that she wrapped up what would have been an hour-long workout in four minutes and twenty-six seconds. That was definitely how exercise worked.

She finished her tea and checked her sent messages.

Waiting there, like an unloved child after soccer practice (or football if one wanted to be international about it), was an email to cauldron@gmail.com

Subject: Catching Up

From: rcostabrown@aol.com

To: cauldron@gmail.com

Hi all,

Hope you are doing well as of late—saw the news about Seattle! Big things are happening, and I’d love to hear more. We should definitely meet up for coffee or lunch.

I’m staying busy between work and hobbies. Read three books last night and made some soap. Broke up a would-be gang way out in Riverside, and flew up to SLO for a meeting with some of the Elite. Things have been good.

Anyways, I thought I’d reach out to see if you needed me for anything. David said he had a meeting with upper management today, and I was wondering if you wanted me there too? Whatever you need done, I’m your woman!

Regards,

Rebecca 

Director Rebecca Costa-Brown

Alexandria

#CancerSurvivor

_Fine, fresh, fierce//We got it on lock_

She’d taken two hours to write the email, followed by another thirty minutes proofreading it. Much like the email she’d sent a couple weeks before, it had received no response. Such was the way of email culture.

Descending further into the depths of her sent folder, Rebecca unearthed an email from three months ago. While the formula of the message was uncannily similar to the one she’d sent just yesterday, this one actually had a reply attached.

Subject: RE: Work Schedule Tomorrow?

From: cauldron@gmail.com

To: rcostabrown@aol.com 

k thx.

-contessa

Rebecca shut her laptop and headed back to her bedroom to pick out a weather-appropriate gray cape. Cauldron may not have required her services today, but the residents of Southern California might.

☀☀☀

Rebecca lived in a conveniently central area. In a car, she could get to any place in the county within twenty minutes, provided there was no traffic. Except for Burbank which was, like, stupid far away no matter how close the starting point.

Today she would not drive. Fast development in Southern California during World War II had left the region at the mercy of car and commuter culture. People moved West and East and South and North to come here, slotting prefab neighborhoods in the gaps between local airports and deserted oil fields, and every piece of unique architecture—the Craftsmans, the Adobes, the Art Decos, and the Ranches—all gave way to cookie-cutter blocks and the dreaded Mid-Century Modern. Over and outwards they went, and suddenly, people were living in places like fucking Menifee and Rancho Cucamonga, where only families of five and bros straight out of the UC system resided. 

So yes, car culture was a product of a system. One that ate and shat and engorged itself on aforementioned shit, and now matter how many petitions Rebecca signed or emails she forwarded to the Cauldron team, the sprawl seeped outwards. But hey, at least their housing crisis wasn’t as bad as the Bay’s.

Rebecca would not contribute to such a system. The smog of the 1980s had buried the foothills of the mountains, of Arcadia and Alhambra and Pasadena, and it had nearly buried Rebecca too. She did not see it that way at the time, but she also hadn’t believed in chemtrails or gay frogs before Cauldron approached her. 

Public transport was an option. Rebecca loathed to take it when they’d been doing construction on the Purple Line for the past three years. It should have been finished last August, except the Metro hit a mammoth skull when digging a tunnel underneath the Fairfax district, turning “construction site” into “excavation site.”

Two of Rebecca’s underlings, both low-level thinkers they kept on retainer for entertainment at office parties, had alerted her of the situation ahead of time. Rebecca, like them, believed that an advance warning to the city could avert the soon-to-be-bureaucratic disaster, if only so that they might preserve the city’s scant train system for all the environmentally-concerned, car-less citizens, and drunk college students. She sent an email. There was no response.

Riding the bus was out of the question. Rebecca took to the skies.

☀☀☀

“Stop right there, or, like, I’ll punch the ground.” 

The man in the rash guard and Birkenstocks paused. Like every American citizen, he had seen Alexandria in action through various pieces of news footage and shaky videos posted to YouTube. Even with the miserable aspect ratio of a vertical cell phone-recording, one could recognize Alexandria’s special moves. 

There was the _Siberian Suplex_ , which she still used, even though poor execution of the stunt resulted in the loss of an eye back in 2000. The _Palm Tree Spectacular_ was another fan favorite among the proud people of the West Coast. Making use of any nearby landscaping, Alexandria would yank a tree from the earth and flail it around like an oversized baseball bat. It usually missed the target, but it looked pretty cool, earning its place in the Flying Brick Tricks Hall of Fame. Whole internet forum boards were dedicated to it, not that the man in the rash guard and Birkenstocks knew or paid attention to that geek shit. _Punching the Ground_ , while not used as frequently due to rampant property destruction, was a much more successful maneuver. Alexandria would beat her big, beefy arms into the ground like the asphalt was a set of unfortunate bongos, and various bits of turf and gravel would jump up and down in a wave-like manner. 

It looked pretty fucking rad from far away. But, like any self-respecting Californian, the man in the rash guard and Birkenstocks feared earthquakes more than any other natural disaster, and what was the _Punching the Ground_ trick, if not an unnatural earthquake? 

Fingers trembling, he raised his hands above his head. The fake tan smeared across his face began to drip. Whether this early-onset perspiration was due to the hot-as-balls temperature outside or the man in the rash guard and Birkenstocks’ own nervousness was anyone’s guess. It was probably both.

“I’m, like, really sorry for driving along the shoulder of the 110,” he said.

Alexandria stood, impassive, except for the traffic direction-mimery she was doing to divert cars around them. She’d taken crossing guard courses at Santa Monica College for this exact purpose. The rush she got from controlling traffic on a freeway was unmatched. 

The man in the rash guard and the Birkenstocks and the streaky spray tan adjusted his Ray-Bans, squinting away from the ever-present sunlight—it was smoggy today, like every other day, so _why_ was it so damn bright outside?

“I totally promise not to do it again,” he continued. “I was just worried about hitting rush hour on the 405.”

“Very well,” Alexandria replied. “Just, like, think before you act next time. Other people have grody commutes too, you know.”

The man in the rash guard, Birkenstocks, streaky spray tan, and Ray-Bans breathed a sigh of relief. 

“Thank you, Alexandria,” he said. “You’re a bodacious woman.”

He climbed back into his car, eyes fixed on the sky above as Alexandria took off. All around him, impatient drivers stopped their honking to track her movement. Nothing caused a traffic jam more than hundreds of looky-loos, and nothing was more compelling than the sight of one of the world’s most famous heroes. 

The man in the rash guard, Birkenstocks, streaky spray tan, and Ray-Bans resigned himself to the even longer drive he’d now have to face. 

_Well played, Alexandria_ , he thought. _Well played._

☀☀☀

There was a new pressed juice bar at the Grove. It was not the type of thing Rebecca would normally make note of, but Usher had strutted into the Protectorate Downtown Branch offices off of Grand and 5th on Friday morning with a brilliant green concoction in hand. He proceeded to co-opt the bimonthly district head meeting with endless plugs for his favorite smoothie store in the Los Angeles Basin. 

☀☀☀

“What makes it so special, dude?” Rime asked. Even she was not immune to the sight of blended superfoods in a recyclable plastic bottle. The condensation, too, dripped slowly down the container and onto Usher’s gloved hand. Surely Usher understood how wasteful the drink’s sweating was—they were in a drought, for god’s sake!

Usher tossed his frosted-tip bangs back and sipped loudly. All eyes were on him.

He finished the drink with relish and chucked it towards a recycling bin across the conference room. As the cup sailed through the air, it spun, tilting on its axis right as it passed over Rime. A verdant splash of liquid landed directly onto her forehead. Rime flinched, followed by the hollow _thunk_ of the cup getting slam-dunked into the trash can.

“Kobe!” said no one, though they were all thinking it.

“Dude,” Rime said, wiping away the juice with her sleeve, “you’re supposed to wash out containers before you recycle them.” 

There was still a streak of green on her brow, the way one might imagine a moldy comet. Most people in Southern California had no clue what the stars looked like, thanks to light pollution that flooded the night sky. Griffith Observatory was a lie.

Usher ignored her and turned to Alexandria, who was still taking notes. Her handwriting was immaculate, the pages perfectly annotated. Not many people knew that Alexandria’s superpowers gave her perfect handwriting. This gap in knowledge offended her, because Alexandria was very proud of her excellent penmanship, so she’d taken to “writing up” various criminals before beating them up, in the hopes that word might spread about the straight lines and swooping curves borne of her very powerful hands. Some of the notes she left were funny. Others were mean. Most of the time they were complaints or stock phrases like “Hang ten...years in jail!”

“They’re vegan-friendly,” Usher insisted. He licked his lips, and when his tongue darted out, it was tinted green from the pineapple juice-spinach combo. There were low-level Changers out there with that exact ability. “You can order antioxidants by the shot.”

Alexandria did not look up from her notes. Her hands did not waver, nor did her pencil stop moving. 

“We should have them cater for our next meeting,” Usher continued. “Superfoods for superpowers to create--”

She looked up. Her expression was neutral, or as neutral as one could get when they were wearing a helmet with a transition lens visor that changed color depending on the amount of direct sunlight exposure. Transition lenses were like mood rings but for nerds. Alexandria was not ashamed of being a nerd, because she was also a jock. She was like an astronaut, if astronauts were down with human experimentation and global conspiracies. Maybe they were. Alexandria had never met an astronaut before.

Alexandria knew very well exactly what her expression looked like, even with the helmet on. She had practiced it for several hours each day before substituting out the routine for power-meditation and email organization, and the end result was a Resting Bitch Face gnarly enough to make grass wither. She’d also learned the expression “Baby Tries Lemon for the First Time,” but that look was only used when her annoying neighbor’s step-son tried to sell her lemonade out of his cardboard stand, made with lemons that had fallen from the lemon tree in her own backyard to the alleyway. She still regretted not trying harder to feed the boy’s cat to the coyotes.

“...superperformance…” 

Usher trailed off. 

“Noted. Meeting over.”

“Oh my god, thank you!” cried Rime, already stumbling out of her chair. An unfortunate side effect of ice powers was that the ground was always slippery, and poor Rime had to wear special cleats to help her get a grip. They were really warm in the summer, which led to Rime’s feet sweating a lot, which led to foot funguses, which led to a change in the Protectorate’s health plan regarding better coverage for antibiotics and podiatric-related issues. 

Apparently athlete’s foot was a common issue. Alexandria fought it every step of the way because she knew from her encyclopedic knowledge of health foods that yogurt was good for the body because it was probiotic. Probiotic, when one breaks the word down, is made up of the words “pro” and “biotic,” which are synonyms for “good” and “life.” So, like, why was foot bacteria any different?

Alexandria lost that fight, and Rime’s feet were known thereafter as the Great Revolutionizers. Some had even suggested creating a holiday to celebrate the toes that had championed workers’ rights, but Cesar Chavez Day already existed. It was probably a good call not to compare the two things, actually. 

Alexandria held open the door for her, and imagined a world where her own feet were historically important social reformers. They would dedicate their phalangeal cause to solving California’s housing crisis, saving the world, and getting people to eat more probiotics.

“So is that a yes?” Usher asked. 

Neither woman bothered to stick around and answer.

☀☀☀

The exchange haunted Rebecca for days. While she had an impeccable memory and even better compartmentalization skills to bury useless crap like this, Usher had chosen exactly the words to get it stuck in her head.

“Antioxidants” was almost as good a word as “All-Natural.” “Vegan-Friendly” was nice too, and Rebecca could respect the hustle, but it seemed hypocritical to be animal cruelty-free when she was certainly not human cruelty-free. Antioxidants, though, called to mind the taste of those neat little powerberry snacks from Trader Joe’s and their slightly inferior snousins (snack cousins), acai bowls and dark chocolate. 

The decision to investigate had become a matter of when, not if. 

Rebecca had no fondness for The Grove. It was bougie and crowded, and she’d been banned from the Anthropologie a few years back after a dispute about a chunky bead necklace. Worst of all, the outdoor mall was _artificial_. The “farmer’s market” had no farmers in sight, the gas station out front was only for decoration, and the parking lot parking space counter never provided accurate numbers. She knew this because she’d spent her last day off checking.

She’d desperately hoped, like a chihuahua scrambling for air in a Kate Spade purse, that Usher’s smoothie shop was the last bastion of the natural in this place.

Scrunching her nose at the minimalist white exterior and Square-reader cash registers, Rebecca suspected this was not the case. She recalled with perfect clarity that before the store had sold juice, it was a cake pop store. Before that, it sold customizable shoe charms, and before that, it had sold cake pops. 

The name of the store, written in plain black font above the entrance, was THRST. 

Rebecca looked at the ground in front of the store, then to her left, and then to her right. She was searching for the missing “i.” 

Oh. It was missing for aesthetic reasons. Rebecca did not like that very much. “Thirst” was a very powerful word. It disturbed Rebecca greatly to know that they had deliberately omitted the only vowel in the word when naming the store. There was no possible way of contorting this situation to her benefit, of bending that “i” sound into the organic “O”s she knew and loved.

Rebecca took a step towards the front door. At least the place hadn’t been turned into a food truck. She despised those portable grease cages.

She took another step forward, and then she was inside.

It smelled cold. The cape she’d chosen to wear today was crafted to be light enough to be comfortable in 75°F weather with 59% humidity. Rebecca had not accounted for air-conditioned interior temperatures. According to Cauldron standards, this lack of consideration was unacceptable. Would Contessa ever be caught with sweaty armpits on her button-up white shirts? No! No. Well, Rebecca had never seen Contessa take off the suit jacket, but when she tried to imagine sweaty pits on the shirt underneath, her mind came up blank. Whatever. The point was that Rebecca had not anticipated weather changes when she first stepped out today, and that was very bad indeed.

The place had an echo that further amplified the sounds of the whirring blenders. Nothing on the menu was below $10.00. 

Behind the counter, a young woman spoke.

“Hello! What can I get for you?”

Rebecca did not flinch. She was much too disciplined for something like that, though the sight of the woman’s botoxed smile was almost as terrifying as the prospect of being nice to someone in customer service.

She scanned the menu quickly, searching for a reasonable item to order. 

“Tell me more about this Golden Ticket.”

The woman’s eyes lit-up, which was good, because her face was otherwise stuck in that permanent plastic grin. 

“The Golden Ticket is our most popular item,” the woman said. “It’s made with Dried Golden Persian Dates, bee pollen, frozen bananas, coconut milk, turmeric, raw cashew butter, and goat colostrum.”

Rebecca considered the price—twenty-seven dollars and thirteen cents plus tax for a single-serving.

“I’d like to know about the breast-feeding goats.”

“Oh, yeah!” The woman fiddled with her hair, which fell down in a long, shiny curtain. Shiny like rhinestones. Rebecca was somewhat jealous of those who had rhinestones on her uniform. She had tried to bedazzle some spandex, back when she was just starting out. It wasn’t a good look.

Now, she gazed at the woman’s shiny hair with disgust and envy in equal parts. 

Rebecca had been to pressed juice shops like this one before, and assumed that just like the others, hair nets were not mandatory. In fact, at THRST, hair nets were against store policy because hair, provided it didn’t have products like mousse or hairspray in it, was all-natural and fibrous. There was an option on the secret menu that allowed customers to order hair as a separate add-in. 

“The goats are free-range and grass-fed. They live up in Humboldt County.”

Rebecca crossed her arms. “Normally I like to, like, check these things out and verify them for myself. It’s important to know where ingredients are sourced from.” 

The woman smiled (involuntarily) and nodded along. 

“Yes. Totally. Absolutely. It’s like checking up on references on a resumé, but for things that you’re going to put inside of you!”

As someone who neither used dating apps nor cyber-stalked dates ahead of time, Rebecca found no qualms with the very sexy way this woman had worded it.

“You can understand,” she said, already moving to tuck her wallet back into one spandex pocket, “that not knowing these goats personally is a total dealbreaker for me.”

The woman continued her nodding, and one could see that she was trying to be more solemn about it now, but the smile would not go away. Perhaps she should have kept her dreams small and stayed with lip and butt injections. Anti-aging procedures barely benefited those under the age of thirty. Rebecca doubted even a vial of Balance could fix her now.

“I’m really sorry to hear that. They also work as goat yoga instructors. Would you accept that as photographic evidence?”

Rebecca googled the name of the farm. Four five-star Yelp reviews were not the same as an in-house visit, but Rebecca really, really wanted that Golden Ticket smoothie. Roald Dahl books were a constant in every children’s hospital ward she’d stayed in, and Rebecca was no more immune to nostalgia than an annoying Facebook friend who wouldn’t shut up about being a nineties kid. 

Besides, there was her ongoing fitness journey to think of. Yes, her body had not changed in decades, but it was always good to be prepared for the worst. Why else would cities insist on spending money on ineffectual Endbringer shelters? 

“Very well,” Rebecca said. “I would like to order one Golden Ticket.”

The woman got to work.

☀☀☀

“I want, like, four more of these,” Rebecca said.

The woman smiled. She hadn’t stopped smiling. 

“You mean, like, you want “like four more of these” or you want “like, four more of these?”

Rebecca frowned. 

“I mean, like, I want like four more of these.”

The woman behind the counter was no longer smizing, though her pearly white teeth were still visible. Maybe she had gotten a discount combo on the plastic surgery and teeth whitening. It would be a legit waste for someone to get one procedure, but not the other. Like attending the Hollywood Bowl but forgetting to bring a bottle of wine. 

“Yes, but, like, the word ‘like’ has like two different connotations.”

Rebecca summoned her Resting Bitch Face—the smoothies here were mediocre and overly expensive, and she would kill to drink, like, four more of them.

“I want, like, four more of these,” Rebecca repeated bitchily. 

The woman got to work.

☀☀☀

One may find themselves wondering, “But _Rebecca_ , drinking five totally fibrous smoothies back to back could give a person ice-cold shits!”

For any mere mortal, yes.

But Rebecca Costa-Brown was no ordinary person. Her body, efficient and bodacious among even the most efficient and bodacious capes, could easily conquer five back-to-back Golden Tickets. 

Rebecca shotgunned the last smoothie. Sitting back in a hard metal chair they’d put inside THRST to match its grody minimalist style, she stared out at the Soul Cyclers in the building across the pavilion. 

Sweaty humans, ruddy-faced and panting, pedalled their hearts out in front of the large wide window, their pathetic New Year’s resolution weight loss goals on blast for every passerby to see. She imagined the thick miasma of cologne wafting from the Abercrombie & Fitch next door made it very challenging for them to breathe. 

Rebecca tried not to feel too smug, but she couldn’t help it. Here they were, doing an hour-long power cycle routine that could have been wrapped up in four minutes and twenty-six seconds. That was definitely how exercise worked. 

Rebecca thought nothing of the fact that her own physical fitness was gifted to her by powers beyond her comprehension. Everyone _knew_ that superpowers were all natural. The ones from the bottle even more so, because they were collected straight from the source. 

Cauldron had _such_ a rad “O” organic sound.

She waved the woman behind the counter over. 

“What do you recommend for juice cleanses?” Rebecca asked.

“We have a whole separate menu for juice cleanses—but before I go grab it, would you mind posing for a picture? Having you on our Instagram page would really give us the publicity boost we’ve been looking for.” 

Rebecca considered the question. A good cape always made a pros and cons list. Then, they crumpled the list up into a ball and ate it like a pregnant woman with Pica Syndrome, and proceeded to make the stupidest and most violent decision accessible to them at that very moment. Such was the way of capes. Even Rebecca, who was smarter and more efficient that the average parahuman, had a deep love of swinging palm trees at criminals. It worked wonders for eliminating traffic on the 710.

The cons, in Rebecca’s mind, were that sponsorships were a complicated and fraught deal, more so for those serving under the Protectorate. Designers from said company would send a mock-up of the sponsored product, Glenn Chambers and his entourage of school-credit interns would pitch a fit about the corny aesthetics of capitalism, and the design would get sent back to the company for further refinement. Corporate lawyers on both sides of the issue would meet in sardine-packed coffee shops to eyefuck paperwork. 

Eventually (like two years down the line) the hero with the sponsorship would find themselves perusing a grocery aisle, only to stumble across some cereal box bearing their likeness. The cereal in question would have been recalled twice in the past year for an outbreak of salmonella in their grain production facilities in Kentucky, and the CEO of the company that owned the cereal would have been fired about six months back for an unearthed brownface costume they wore for Halloween, coupled with testimonials from people in the company about the CEO’s racist behavior. The sponsored cape would pitch a fit about being associated with a totally inferior and grody product (“Nothing less than Kellogg's will do!”), Glenn would ask an intern to take the company off their corporate Christmas card list, and by the time the product had been removed from the shelves, the cape would already have been approached by another company. Rinse and repeat.

Rebecca had the misfortune of being one of the most in-demand heroes for sponsored ads, and there had never been a contract she hadn’t regretted. 

(Except for the deal with Disney, of course. That negotiation had taken nearly five years to wrap-up, but it was all worth it when Rebecca saw her sculpted body and long, black tresses and ripped-as-fuck megatits in a one-second background shot of Pixar’s third _White Heterosexual Male Dog Meets White Heterosexual Female Cat_ spin-off short. The short was nominated for an Oscar and won, because members of the Academy never actually watched the animated categories. If they had, they would’ve seen that the short had consisted of dated and cheesy references to the season four plotline of CBS’ _Parahumans & Paramours_, network television’s ONLY cape dating show. Like everything in Southern California, it all came back to branding.)

(Rebecca’s sponsorship had been canceled when video footage surfaced of her beating a man with his own selfie stick at Disneyland’s California Adventure Theme Park™️. It totally sucked that they’d lost such an important contact in The Industry, but much like Cauldron, Disney had their finger in a lot of pies. They’d come crawling back any day now. Just wait.)

(Those Disneyland churros sucked ass anyways.) 

Disgruntled by the thought of losing those chewy, warm, cinnamony tubes of fried dough, Rebecca struggled to come up with pros. She shouldn’t have beaten the man with his unfolding metal stick. Even if it was explicitly banned at The Land of the D, which was a funny and sexy nickname she had developed for Disneyland when she was fourteen. Even if the man had poked her on the head when they were in line for Heimlich’s Choo-Choo Train, a ride that was very near and dear to her heart because Heimlich ate healthy foods like carrots for his eyes and transformed into a beautiful butterfly thanks to his diet. 

The topic of food. That was what it all came down to—it was one harmless picture. It might even win her a discount on the juice cleanse liquids she had been inquiring about. It was decided. She would do this for the juice.

Rebecca flipped her cape and flipped her hair and struck a cool pose. The cool pose in question was one of those peace signs but sideways, the exact kind of thing that befuddled middle school principals believed to be gang signs. It would appeal to the youth masses of Instagram, and any confused Pinterest moms would follow the trend too, for fear of looking uncool. In her other hand, Rebecca held a Golden Ticket. This staged picture would make her THRST’s Golden Ticket. Rebecca liked the symmetry of that.

“Okay, thanks!” The Botox woman said. She was rapidly clicking through her phone now, adding filters and vignettes and other bits of social media wizardry that Rebecca understood but did not care about. She hoped the woman didn’t touch up Rebecca at all. Her body was already aesthetically perfect. 

“By the way,” Rebecca said, strategically interrupting the woman the moment she saw her thumb hovering over the ass-fattener tool. It was an unmistakable button, slotted between the lasso effect and the color editor, and looked like a Venn Diagram with one half of the middle part erased. “I’d love it if you tagged my dear friend Usher in the picture. He was the one who recommended this place to me.”

“Of course. The cape Usher, not the music Usher, right?”

Rebecca watched as her fingers moved away from the ass-fattener tool. 

“Right.” 

A master manipulator, Rebecca was. 

“And done—it‘s posted now.” 

Rebecca knew that in less than thirty minutes, the picture would find its way to Glenn who would immediately pitch a fit (that was all he did, as Rebecca understood it. She also understood he was a necessary evil, like clipping one’s fingernails or abducting and dumping Case Fifty-Threes.) 

It hardly mattered. Rebecca had secured catering for the next biweekly district head meeting.

☀☀☀

The thing about beaches is that there are, like, a lot of them. Enough to make up an entire coastline, in fact, so saying one is going to the beach is not specific enough. Some beaches have a pier, or a breakwater, or bonfire pits. Others have skateboarders and dogs and skateboarding dogs. 

Rebecca secretly believed that bothering to distinguish the beaches was dumb, since the only thing separating one beach from another was the price for parking. She had not stopped to consider that most definitions were human-made and based on very arbitrary parameters, similar to the way Rebecca saltwater-taffy-ed her understanding of organic labels into eating whatever the fuck she wanted. 

None of this actually mattered because Rebecca felt no need to change the beach-naming system. Sorting out over, like, 800 miles of coastline was something that simply didn’t interest her. She had better things to do. Like refreshing her email.

There was still no response from Cauldron. In a fit of anger, Rebecca deleted one of the Make-a-Wish requests. It was for Disneyland anyways, and she still wasn’t allowed back there. 

She ignored two emails about saving a historical site in Orange County. Disneyland was in Anaheim and Anaheim was in Orange County, so why should she give a fuck what happened behind the Orange Curtain? They could keep their churros and selfie sticks and sick children to themselves.

Rebecca took a few calming breaths and practiced mindfulness. Sometimes doing adult things, like checking her email or reading the news, caused Rebecca’s blood pressure to spike. Not literally. Her body was bodacious and tubular like a healthy wave, but Rebecca liked to imagine she could feel her blood pressure spiking anyways. 

She checked her email one more time, and wondered why the city hadn’t responded to her warning about some sabertooth skulls near the train dig site. She wondered if they were too busy to worry about public transportation because they were working on resolving the housing crisis. She’d sent them many emails on that too. 

A notification for a new message from a concerned citizen about Protectorate policing in low-income neighborhoods popped up on her phone. Rebecca swiped it away before she could read it. Any moment now, Cauldron would surely respond. It was only four in the afternoon, after all. Everybody knew everything good in the world happened after 4 PM, like happy hour and golden hour and women-drink-free-hour. 

“Excuse me, Ma’am.” 

There was a tap on Rebecca’s shoulder. She turned sharply, shoving her phone away into her pocket. The fit was tight, which meant the spandex was doing its job.

“How may I help you today?” Rebecca replied, putting on her best hero voice. There were times to sound like Rebecca and there were times to sound like Alexandria. The “like”s would have to go. 

A woman with damp eyes and a nose piercing looked up at her and sniffled. Rebecca did not “cry” or “get sad” or any of that other punk bitch stuff, at least not since she was very young, so she was unsure if the woman was crying or just soaked from swimming. 

“A jellyfish stung me,” the woman blubbered. She held out her arm, which was nasty and red and splotchy. 

Rebecca had always been ambivalent about wounds and gore on the battlefield, but this was a rash. Rashes were different. Rashes were gnarly in a bad way.

“I can fly you to the hospital,” Rebecca said. She didn’t like the idea of committing to helping someone for the next five minutes when she should have been on standby for the inevitable Cauldron email, but popping over to the ER and coming right back was a miniscule task in the grand scheme of things.

“No,” the woman said, still speaking through tears and dripping saltwater. Come to think of it, perhaps the saltwater in her eyes was what was making her cry. “You need to pee on it.”

To her credit, Rebecca considered it. 

She really did. 

The thing was that this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to convince Rebecca (both in and out of costume) to urinate on something. People were disgusting little freaks like that. 

She’d seen every excuse in the book, from the old “I’ve been trapped in Death Valley without water for two whole days” to the clever “my houseplant will die if we don’t water it ASAP.” Jellyfish sting treatment was a common request, enough so that for a period of time, Rebecca couldn’t go to the beach. 

She’d eventually used her leverage as Director Costa-Brown to release official documents about the powersets of the Triumvirate. Nestled in among facts about Legend’s flight speed and Eidolon’s time frame for ability switching was a fascinating tidbit about Alexandria: her piss was deadly to the touch.

It was total bullshit.

It got the job done.

Rebecca shook her head.

“I’m sorry. Perhaps you should go ask that lifeguard over there.” She pointed in the direction of the lifeguard, a puka shell necklace type dude that was probably a business major who’d failed to get an internship this summer. 

The woman sighed, teary-eyed, before stumbling off in the direction of Lifeguard Station 7. 

☀☀☀

“Alexandria, please, you have to help!”

Rebecca sighed, turning away from the stuffed animal cart she’d been perusing. The bubble machine the vendor was running had caught her attention first, iridescent little pockets of air and soap drifting down wind in Rebecca’s direction. Transfixed and seized by a sudden burst of childlike wonder, Rebecca followed the trail. The boardwalk crowds parted before her like a kiss to garlic breath. Rebecca had never had garlic breath before. That sort of behaviour was unacceptable for a cape of her caliber. Not that Rebecca actively did anything to prevent garlic breath. It was merely another incredible aspect of her powerset.

Reluctantly placing a giant bean-filled cat she’d been holding back on the narrow shelf, Rebecca pulled herself to attention.

“How may I help you, sir?”

The old man in question flailed about for a bit, windmilling his arms like a retired sign flipper. He was too old to _not_ be retired, and his arm sockets made grody popping noises as he brought them front-to-back and front-to-back. Rebecca had no fondness for old people and the way they brought the smell of death and mothballs with them wherever they went. She resisted the urge to flash him the Resting Bitch Face.

“Someone stole the Segway I was renting!” 

She looked in the direction he was pointing, and sure enough, there was a white man with dreads scootering away down the boardwalk. 

Rebecca considered the situation carefully and quickly. 

She could easily fly up to the man and apprehend him like she would any cape criminal, but there were too many witnesses here and that would look bad in the long run. A scandal with the head of the Miami Protectorate division was about to leak (calculated ahead of time, of course), and until then, all the higher ups were expected to remain in line. The scandal in question was an affair with the current star of _Parahumans & Paramours _. Rebecca hated the show. Half of the people on it weren’t even capes, just horny baseline twenty-something-year-olds. People were pretty stupid when it came to “Hollywood Magic,” as if their high school theater departments didn’t also have access to giant fans and fog machines and wire pulley systems. 

The palm trees surrounding them on this generic SoCal beach were tempting. Rebecca was stoked at the prospect of uprooting something. It wouldn’t even be hard. She could do it with the twitch of one brow, if she so wished. Rebecca’s brows were just as indestructible as the rest of her, which made grooming them quite difficult. Her esthetician had to order special wax from an artisan tinker who lived up in Sacramento, since it was the only thing that could remove the errant hairs. Despite having the procedure done about every three months since she was a non-sickly teenager, Rebecca hated conforming to beauty standards. To assuage her guilt, Rebecca recited a special phrase after every appointment: “they may tame my brows, but they will never tame my spirit.”

Rebecca resisted the urge to remove her helmet and stroke at a delicate eyebrow. Her lenses had just finished transitioning to the harsh sunlight, and were now the appropriate shade. No, the palm trees would have to stay. Just because she could do something didn’t mean she would.

White Dreads was still slowly scootering away. His Hawaiian shirt flapped gently in the breeze.

It dawned upon Rebecca what she would have to do, and the sacrifice she would have to make for the sake of heroism. For keeping the world safe from Segway thieves. 

Rebecca took off. Swinging wide on the boardwalk, casual beachgoers and tourists alike stepped back as she sprung forward. There was a little stall that would suit her purposes just fine.

She leaped from sandy wood to plastic, landing solidly on both feet. In the blink of an eye, Rebecca had snatched her wallet from one spandex pocket, chucked a bill at the stall owner, and had tucked her wallet away again.

Rebecca, now riding a Segway of her own, followed in hot pursuit.

☀☀☀

Fact: A Segway can hit up to speeds of 12.5 miles per hour.

Fact: This speed is determined by Segway Inc., the makers of the Segway and determiners of the speed at which Segways go, who determine the speed of Segways by user reviews. 

Fact: People are very bad at driving Segways.

Rebecca swerved around a crying child, leaning into the bend to create a more aerodynamic shape. She’d mastered a thousand forms of martial arts, had studied the dual arts of wordplay and seduction, and had even learned how to juggle. Segway-riding was a snap. Slightly harder than horse-riding and slightly easier than golf-karting. 

Rebecca’s Segway wheeled down the boardwalk at a speed of 13 miles per hour—this was exactly half-a-mile per hour faster than the normal Segway speed. She was slowly gaining on White Dreads, and from the fearful glances he kept on shooting her when he took his eyes off the path (unsafe driving, as expected from a disgusting thief), he knew it too.

Rebecca was able to pilot her Segway faster than the average scooter not because hers was some pimped up, modded out variety of the average rental, but because those speed estimates were based off of user data. Rebecca, who had a mind like a scalpel, was far more efficient and effective when it came to performing every task imaginable. Scootering was no exception. 

It was in the flick of the wrist as she held the handlebars. It was how she tucked her cape partially into her belt to pin it back and reduce drag. It was the way she kept her feet forward and slightly turned out like a ballet dancer-turned pageant girl who had quit many years ago but still retained some of the posture. Rebecca was quite possibly—no, most _certainly_ —the most talented Segway operator in existence.

Ten feet ahead of her but shrinking, White Dreads reached to his left and toppled a trash can. Rebecca, shifting her weight up and over, bounced the Segway wheels up from the ground, soaring laterally for a moment until one wheel was on the boardwalk and another was on the sand. Multi-track drifting.

She pummeled forward, kicking up a cloud of sand behind her. It looked super fucking cool. 

White Dreads let out a yelp when he turned around and saw Rebecca inching closer. Not looking forward, he bowled over a sunburnt man down on one knee. The woman the sunburnt man was facing let out a screech, and White Dreads seized the opportunity, Segway-ing onwards.

Rebecca twisted the bars of her Segway and did a halting stop in a 360-loop. 

“Do an ollie!” yelled a skateboarder nearby.

Rebecca ignored him and turned to the sobbing couple. 

“What’s wrong, good citizens?” she asked in her best Alexandria voice. 

“That menace on the Segway knocked me over and I dropped my engagement ring,” said the sunburnt man. 

Rebecca gave him a onceover and found him lacking. He was exactly the sort of generic asshole to want to publicly propose on a beach where it would be incredibly awkward for his girlfriend to turn him down.

“Stewart, oh my god,” cried the woman, “how are we supposed to get married and claim tax benefits now?”

Never mind then. It seemed Rebecca would have to take a break from her pursuit of justice to aid the lovebirds. Distantly, she wondered if their faces were actually familiar, not just “proposal-on-a-beach-and-forgot-to-put-on-sunscreen familiar.” 

Whatever. It did not matter.

Letting one heavy boot fall onto the sand, Rebecca leaned over and plucked the ring from the ground. She had seen it fall with her incredible vision, and remembered where it was with her incredible memory.

She handed it back to the man. It had an unusually small diameter for an engagement ring, but Rebecca supposed the man had probably not bothered to find out his lover’s ring size, if this lazy and uninspired beach proposal was anything to go by.

“Oh, thanks Alexandria!” he said. “We won’t forget this! Sorry for the major bruh moment on my part.” Then, swiveling on one jorts-clad knee, he stared at his soon-to-be fiancee. “Evelyn, babe, I’m presenting this ring to you as a declaration of my love. We both like a lot of the same things—kayaking, long walks on the beach, and taking iPhone pictures of pollution-dyed sunsets. I think we’d be really good, or at least look really good together. Will you marry me?”

“Oh my god, Stewart, yes! Thirty-seven times yes!” 

Delicately, the woman slipped off her flip-flop. Stewart grinned wider, placing the ring on her fourth toe. It was a perfect fit.

Oh. A toe ring. One of Rebecca’s perfectly groomed eyebrows twitched. Perhaps she should’ve chucked the jewelry off into the ocean where it belonged. She did not consider that nearly three hundred sea turtles each year are harmed by stray toe rings, which they swim through as babies and grow around as they get bigger until their shells are all warped around the littered toe ring corsets. 

It’s a little known but common problem, usually overshadowed by the sea turtles harmed by those six-pack plastic rings. This is a calculated move on the part of environmental activist groups—it’s easy to get people to recycle drink holders, but toe rings are another story entirely. If the Friends of the Sea Turtles Society asked their members to stop wearing toe rings to save the sea turtles, all of their members would probably just say “fuck the sea turtles.” 

Rebecca, who despised toe rings with a burning passion, also despised performative activism. It was probably good she did not know this little “fun fact.”

All around them, people clapped and cheered as the couple began to make out.

“Holy shit, dude,” cried the skateboarder, “that chick’s the current star of _Parahumans & Paramours _!” 

Rebecca looked back at the couple. Suddenly, their familiar faces made sense. She recalled seeing their headshots in an info folder earlier this week, alongside blurry photographs of Evelyn and the Head of the Miami Protectorate team playing beach limbo together. Rebecca supposed that it was possible that they would get married before the scandal leaked, but she doubted it. 

Gazing at the woman’s honking huge toe ring, Rebecca opted not to say a word. Good fucking riddance.

Rebecca mounted her Segway again, and began to channel flight into the tubby plastic wheels, lighting slightly off the ground as she and her vehicle of choice resumed their chase after White Dreads.

White Dreads was still only going about 12.5 miles per hour. Incompetent fool.

Meanwhile, Rebecca had picked up speed with her little stunt. If her superbrain was guesstimating correctly (and it was), Rebecca was moving at thirty MPH and picking up speed. She flew a bit faster and a bit higher, letting the little wheels of the Segway cycle uselessly in the air.

As she rose with the setting sun behind her, she cast a long shadow. Darkness engulfed White Dreads, and he glanced back again. Safety hazard strike three.

“Halt,” Rebecca said.

He continued to scooter.

“Stop,” she ordered again. White Dreads ignored her.

Hooking her knees around the center post, Rebecca raised her arms up and flew ever higher. 

“You cannot run from me,” she said. “When I decide to do something, nothing will get in my way. Not trash nor beachside engagements nor cool Segway tricks. Like the rising tides, I am inevitable.”

With that, she flew directly above White Dreads and let the Segway drop.

He crumpled with the pile of electric scooters. A skateboarder skating in the opposite direction stunted around the two-Segway pile up, flicking off Rebecca and White Dreads as they rolled by. Traffic, too, was inevitable in Southern California. 

☀☀☀

“I’ll get a cheeseburger, Animal-Style, with fries and a coke.” 

Rebecca stood at the front of the line, ignoring the looks she was garnering with her heroic presence. A pimply teenager typed the order in. They were the real heroes here. The brave cashiers of In-N-Out acted as the building blocks of civilized society, spreading hope and good cheer with their fresh fries and onion and Thousand Island dressing-soaked burgers. Though perhaps that was a more charitable interpretation than Rebecca normally gave. She had heard through the grapevine that In-N-Out workers were paid above minimum wage, and sometimes had health benefits. She wondered if their company also covered problems with Athlete’s Foot.

“Do you want the fries to be Animal-Style too?” 

Rebecca thought about it. 

“No thank you,” she said. Animal-Style was the California burger lover’s best kept secret, a delicious combination of caramelized onions grilled in mustard, “Special” Thousand Island dressing, and melted cheese. It was very good on both burgers and fries, but one really had to be willing to take it to the next level to order it on both. Rebecca just wasn’t stoked enough about it to order the fries today.

“That’ll be $5.65,” said the cashier. 

Rebecca whipped out her credit card, which was all black and had a little Alexandria silhouette on the corner under the CVV code. Naturally, she had a platinum card from the Protectorate for discretionary funds, which she used for juice catering and other juice-related expenses. That card was blue and shiny but somewhat generic, like every other object branded by the US Government. The card that Rebecca was using was not that. This card was her Cauldron Card. When Doctor Mother had given it to her on her twenty-third birthday, she was given the explicit orders to use it “only in the case of emergency.” Rebecca thought that buying some pity fries for herself definitely counted as an emergency. If Cauldron had a problem with it, they could just email her.

(On the subject of pity fries: Rebecca wasn’t actually calling them that. She was Alex-fucking-andria, and she was always awesome, all the time. If anyone deserved to feel bad it was everybody else on the planet.) 

The cashier took her card without comment. He swiped it, then waited for the receipt to print. No reaction to the embossed numbers, or the onyx-black text shadows, or the Alexandria silhouette in the corner.

“I used to be a pescatarian, y’know,” Rebecca said, apropos of nothing. 

Why did she say that? It was true, of course. Rebecca had a phase where she did not partake of any sort of meat besides fish, but the period ended when she read an article about Mercury poisoning caused by consumption of Tuna, Mahi-Mahi, and Swordfish. The concept of putting toxins in her body disgusted Rebecca, irrational as it was. She just couldn’t shake the theory that her former ailments were caused by something she had eaten or drunk or huffed, and that someday it would return with a vengeance. Regardless, not being a pescatarian anymore wasn’t that much of a loss, because Rebecca could still claim moral superiority through her work as a superhero. That wasn’t even considering the unpaid volunteering she did with Cauldron. They say that the greatest givers say the least. Rebecca, in her own humble opinion, was one of the greatest givers in existence. 

No, the real question was why. Why did Rebecca feel the need to share such a fact with the cashier, one California hero to another? There was no need to justify eating here! In-N-Out had that spectacular round “O” sound right in the name. Eating at In-N-Out as a Southern Californian was as natural as breathing! She was supporting a local business!

The cashier pulled the receipt from the printer. 

“That means I didn’t eat meat,” Rebecca said. “I only ate vegetables and fish.”

She studied the cashier carefully, looking for any other tell. She’d put her foot in her mouth, but she could still turn this conversation around. She could still win!

“It’s a much healthier lifestyle—” 

“You can wait right over there,” the cashier said, cutting her off. “Next!”

Rebecca scowled and turned away. She could’ve won that conversation, if she’d had more time. Stupid busy In-N-Out and their stupid busy customers.

Crowded in near the soda machine with five other patrons, Rebecca waited the most painful ten minutes of her life. Her transition lenses had not adjusted to the interior lighting, making it harder to see, and a particularly slobbery toddler attempted to chew on her cape before the father pulled it away. By the time her name was called, Rebecca was about ready to leap over the counter. 

She did not, but she did snatch her bag away from the cashier perhaps a bit harsher than she otherwise would have—what reason did they have to act so snippy anyways? They were getting paid above, like, minimum wage to work here!

☀☀☀

The trip home was tolerable. Rebecca flew low over the southbound 105, hoping to get a better reaction from the desperate commuters below than she had in the In-N-Out. 

The Cauldron Card felt like it weighed more and more with each mile Rebecca flew. She felt guilty for spending their money in a situation that wasn’t justified. It was an icky, icky feeling. Rebecca rarely felt guilty, because she rarely did anything wrong.

Come to think of it, why didn’t they have a discount for capes? Military and elderly discounts were a thing, and parahumans were certainly traumatized enough to deserve a free soda here and there. 

That was when Rebecca heard it.

Clutching her bag of In-N-Out tighter, Rebecca dove low to listen in.

The transgressor, a rusted Volkswagen bus (a vehicle created by stoners, for stoners), was driving sixty down the freeway with its windows rolled all the way down. Didn’t they know that doing something like that was dangerous? A pebble could fly in through the window and hit the driver directly in the eye, causing them to careen directly into the carpool lane, killing four people and causing a traffic jam for the next two hours! A traffic jam! The only thing more dangerous was, perhaps, driving at night with the backseat ceiling lights on.

But no. That wasn't what upset Rebecca. 

What she heard—louder now, as she hovered behind the van’s rounded bumper—was _Big Poppa_ by Biggie Smalls, being blasted through the open windows.

Her ears bled. Her eyes wept. Her fries cooled.

“How dare you listen to anyone other than Tupac in the beautiful state of California?” Rebecca cried. “West Coast best coast!”

She hovered for a moment, then took off. Some battles weren’t worth fighting. 

Some battles were already lost.

☀☀☀

The fries were cold, practically inedible by the time Rebecca returned home. Out-of-staters loved to bitch about how this sort of thing always happened with In-N-Out fries, but she never saw them giving McDonald’s the same heat. It angered her, to be put in a position where she was proved wrong so easily. More infuriating still was that this potato tragedy could have been avoided if she’d simply flown straight home. 

Rebecca dumped the fries in the trash. She wasn’t hungry anymore.

Her nightly routine was the same as it always was: more tea and a night shower and a quick bout of power-cycling. The workout took a total of four minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Three seconds slower than her normal speed, but still faster than the hour-long set it should have been. That was definitely how exercise worked. 

She checked her email once more, and found the inbox empty. A technological tumbleweed rolled through, like those ones people pass on the drive out to the Joshua Tree. One could always see the tumbleweeds rolling by when they stopped off in Cabazon to visit the roadside plastic dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had been there for, like, as long as the movie _Pee-wee’s Big Adventure_ had existed. They stank on the inside, an upsetting combination of melted plastic and desert-induced body odor. And, of course, they’d been there since at least the eighties. Rebecca missed the eighties terribly. One couldn’t say “radical” or wear shoulder pads with their pantsuits anymore. 

Rebecca tucked herself into bed, wrapping her cape around her. The sunrise would wake her tomorrow, just as it always did. Rest in Peace, backyard mourning doves.


End file.
